[Discuss] I need some dual-booting advice

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Rich,

Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> writes:

> I have a couple of workstations I need to get set up. The owner wants to
> have both Windows and RHEL6 on them. Either dual-boot or running Windows
> in a virtual machine on Linux hosts is acceptable to the owner. Both
> operating systems need to be available to multiple users on the console
> (not simultaneously) and if Windows is virtualized then automatic USB
> pass through from the console is required.
>
> These last two have me stumped for the best way to get these set up. My
> first attempt was with KVM but USB pass through is a manual process that
> has to be performed by an administrator for each device. This is not
> viable. My second attempt was with a VMware workstation shared virtual
> machine which I discovered the hard way doesn't do USB pass through at all.
>
> Is there some virtalization trick that I'm missing, something that will
> do a shared virtual machine with automatic USB pass through or is
> dual-booting the only way to get this working?

What exactly do you mean by "Shared Virtual Machine"?  Can't you create
a /vmware partition that is owned by e.g. root:vmware_users, set mode
6775, and put the VM config in there?

I know that Vmware workstation supports USB pass through.  It's always
worked for me.  But I'm not sure what you mean by "shared virtual
machine" because that might actually change the parameters.

For me, on workstation-12, when I open a VM I can set USB to
"automatically connect devices".

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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